Leader Of The Trapped Ones - Chapter 2

The hatch opened up to a world full of white and light. The ground was white, the sky was white, even white fell from the sky. I stepped forwards carefully, putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the end of the hatch. I grunted as I turned and closed the door behind me, locking it with the key. Squatted down and I proceeded to dig a small hole near the lab. Putting the keys inside, I covered the hole and patted the dirt down.

“It hurts,” I mumbled. Cold needles pricked beneath my feet.

The ground was cold, unlike the lab which had a neutral temperature. It was too cold.

My feet felt numb after stepping on the ground for too long, but they also melted the white that resided under them.

The white element was a very weird substance. Afterward, I took a moment to look at the tall plants, and if I could remember correctly, they were called “trees”. They too were covered by this white substance.

I had discovered new data about this new world. It rained white.

‘So the world is white.’ I resolved.

After recording all of that in my mind, I continued on my journey too somewhere.

Except I didn’t know where I would end up.

All I knew was that I had to run away from here before the lab people found me. I ran and counted the time I had spent so far, in seconds, it took me to get where I went. It kept my mind away from the pain the white substance inflicted on me.

604,800 seconds was what I had ended up with. I had been running somewhere for seven days.

“Seven in days or one week,” I muttered. “Four weeks equal one month, twelve months equal one year, ten years equals a decade and two decades equal a score, five scores equal a century and that is the way of time.” I recited the times table that they had taught us.

Suddenly my body halted on its own, my nose had picked up the smell of humans. They each smelled different, but there was one that I liked, the person who smelled like honey.

A delicacy that the guards would give us every once in a while.

But there weren’t just humans present, there were other organisms there too. Their scent was just like that of a humans’ but slightly different. They smelled rotten, like the food my guards gave me sometimes when they had forgotten to give it to me earlier.

I hated that smell. I wanted it gone, and I was going to remove it. No matter what stood in my way.

I stopped running and got down on all fours, and moved silently so that no one could notice me.

After arriving five meters away from where I thought they were, I climbed the tree to my right. The trees to my right-hand side were connected to each other by means of their branches. This only made it easier for me to approach my targets without getting spotted. Because I was so light, the branches didn’t break under me, they only creaked as I jumped from one to another.

I analyzed the situation while I understood what was going on. The rotten humans had surrounded the normal humans.

There were three rotten humans surrounding three non-rotten ones. I scanned the humans first making sure they were not in any way or form related to the lab.

The first human I analyzed was a woman, she seemed to be young, probably around her mid-’20s. Her brown hair was supposed to be in a bun but I guess that the all the running had loosened it up, making random strands of hair stick out of place. She wore black jeans and a long, blue jacket of some sort. Her scent wasn’t anything special, and it didn’t really shout, ‘I’m from the lab!’ so I moved on to the next person.

Now, this was the one, I might have to be wary of. A man around his 30s, and he was swinging a wooden bat around, fighting off the zombies that came near them. He had a brown unshaven beard but no hair on the top.

“Weird. Why doesn’t he have hair?” However, that was a question to be answered later.

Both his shirt and his pants had various types of stains on them, ones that I couldn’t pinpoint where they could have come from. Then there was his smell, the smell of blood. It wasn’t just the rotten humans smell that was on him, it was the normal humans too. He hadn’t dyed himself in blood like me, but the fact that I could still smell it meant that he must have killed more than five people.

“Dangerous,” I noted before I looked at the last person.

“Honey-boy,” I murmured. “He’s the sweet one.”

Way shorter than both adult, he looked to be my age. Honey-boy hair’s had short bangs with an undercut, a haircut that was popular once, with the guards, in the lab. He wore a long black hoodie with an unusual pair of pink washed out jeans.

A rotten human howled before swapping it nails at honey-boy. In a quick response, my body growled at it, warning it that if it touched him, I would destroy it. The rotten human paused before turning to find where I was.

I frowned and shifted myself more to the back of the trees. I couldn’t let them see me. Seconds felt like hours before the rotten ones went back to bothering the human. Getting out of my hiding spot and I got ready to jump off the trees and onto the back of the rotten one. I couldn’t wait any longer if I did honey-boy would become one of them and lose his sweet smell.

Putting most of my force into my feet and leg muscles, I jumped right onto the back of the rotten one. The one who tried to hurt honey-boy.

It felt exactly like the lab, everything was in slow motion.

I coiled my body around rotten ones’ back like a python. My body restricted it from making any sudden movements. Using both hands, I grabbed his head and shoulder before pulling them apart from the other.

The head came off the rotten one body so smoothly that I questioned whether I had grown stronger in just a week or this human was just weak. Along with the head and spinal cord, blue blood now painted my red gown. Holding the head with both hands, I swung it like a whip. Striking the rotten ones away from the humans, I roared at them.

The rotten ones scrambled to their feet to run away but I wasn’t letting them. I had tasted blood and now I wanted more. Throwing precisely the cord at the other rotten, I trapped both its foot under the bones. I jumped towards the farthest one, unlike the other had already started to run. Grabbing his head, I pulled it to the nearest tree before smashing it, continuously against the tree.

Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, until its face was barely recognizable.

Its forehead was deeply split open in the middle allowing brain discharge to spill out from it. Removing my hand from the back of its neck, I watched it glide down to the floor. I still seemed to be alive as it twitched a bit. Putting some power into my hand, I stabbed at its brain.

“Disgusting,” I grumbled and wiped the liquid on the rotten ones’ shirt.

Finally, It had stopped twitching.

Turning around I wondered if the other rotten was smart enough to escape.

Nope, it was still there.

Staring at its fallen companion, that laid at the roots of the tree, it seemed to have given up any resistance. It lay flat on the dirt waiting for its turn.

“Let me give you releasement,” I spoke, dragging each word.

Slowly I walked to it. Standing directly above it, I lifted my leg to end the rotten one’s life. Suddenly the rotten one hand grasped my leg and pulled it towards its toothy mouth.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, somewhat surprised. “Aren’t you a cunning one.” Seizing the rotten one’s hand, I pulled them off my legs and off its body. Throwing them to someplace, I focused my attention back to what I was doing.

I casually lifted my leg again and pressed on its head. I wanted it to taste pain and horror. Staring to put some force onto my feet, crushing its head. Soon blue blood ran out of the head. So I lifted my leg and gave the head a stump.

Soon the world came back to normal and I started to feel unstable.

‘Uh,’ I groaned. ‘I had used too much energy.’ My thoughts started to disappear. My body swayed right to left before I finally fell onto the ground.

After I fell, I could hear shouting and the sound from someone running to me.

Soon I felt myself also in a person’s embrace but before I could find out who it was, my body had shut down, and I had collapsed.